Pages

MidwestRoots.Net

MidwestRoots.net
Professional Genealogy Services for the Midwest, by Harold Henderson, CG (SM).

Certified Genealogist and CG are proprietary service marks
of the Board for Certification of Genealogists® used by the
Board to identify its program of genealogical competency
evaluation and used under license by the Board’s associates.

This book is about the heroes and cowards of the Civil War. It is about tests of adversity on the battlefield and on long marches and in the POW camps where so many soldiers died. It tells of glory and shame after the war, and of how former slaves made the transition to being free men. What do stories of deserters, POWs, returning veterans, and men throwing off the bonds of slavery have in common? While seemingly unrelated, these stories are connected by a common thread: how men interacted with their comrades, and how these interactions affected their decisions and their outcomes. . . .

Our analytical approach, like that of the authors of The American Soldier, is statistical. An advantage of this approach is that it permits us to weigh the relative importance of different motives in men’s decisions.

We begin with the stories of nine men who fought in the Civil War. They were ordinary men. They merit no mention in history books. But despite their anonymity, we can reconstruct their lives and the lives of their comrades from administrative and other official records. Their lives can suggest why some communities work while others do not, and why the distinction matters.

Costa's web page, linked above, includes the full text of some papers that went into the making of the book. I haven't read it yet, but it looks like valuable context for those who research Civil War participants on a regular basis.